The TI-99/4A was a great little machine, and had massive advantages over a lot of the others in the market at the time. TI dropped the line though. I guess Commodore and Atari were just too popular for TI to carve out much of a market share.

That game was amazing 42 levels of Space Invaders-type gameplay - but the enemy types were different in each level - not just in the way they looked, but in the way they behaved, so you had to approach each level differently. And the graphics were nice! We had a CGA card back then, but I was really amazed that the game ran in 16-colors - which was probably made possible by the "Lores Toolbox" which the authors (Elven Software) also sold.

They indicated that the game was written in Turbo Pascal - one of the things that made me realize that games can actually be made at home with the right tools I really wanted to learn Pascal back then to make a game just like that!

I think Borland even marketed "starter kits" to go with Turbo Pascal back then - I can't remember the exact term. They had a game pack, I think something like a spreadsheet pack, etc.

i dont remember if i played that on our 2600 - but if i did i may have blocked out the memory - damn that looks boring. pitfall harry - now that was *the* atari 2600 game. I remember when activision started making carts for the atari - i wonder if that was one of the very first example of successfull 3rd party cartridge developers. It was exciting times when Activision started making games - they had a real quality to them.

Parsec (TI99-4A) Since I worked for T.I. I had access to games for the TI99-4A before they were available to the public and BEFORE the games were burned on ROM cartridges.

When Parsec first came out there was no cart. I copied the code into RAM (no offline storage) line-by-line for many hours into the "99" I borrowed from the assembly line (it was authorized by my boss) one weekend just so I could play the game for about forty mins. Talk about your law of diminishing return!

Oddly, the "Parsec" I coded and played was NOT this one below, even though they were both T.I. products. The "Parsec" I played had a space station in the middle of the screen and the aliens would come in from north, south, east and west with ever greater speed and frequency until you succumbed and you would eventually succumb!...

GOD! That's the famous Atari 2600's ET! The game that caused the video game crash in 1983 and almost killed Atari altogether in the process. You know about the millions of carts buried in New Mexico, don't you?

Far from the oldest game I have played, but Master of Magic is a game that I still play occasionally.

There is no game like it, I prefer it to Master of Orion (though 1 & 2 were classics as well), Civilization , or pretenders to the throne like Age of Wonders (I,II,etc), Heroes of Might and Magic, Lords of magic etc..

Dominions is pretty cool, but isn't geared for Single Player and is I think overly complicated for my tastes.

If you have never played Master of Magic, you need to! The graphics are old (but I kinda of like the style), but the gameplay is among the deepest I have seen and yet engaging. (I think games like Space empires V, and Dominions are too complicated to be playable for all but 0.1% of players and I'm pretty hardcore!)

Hmm, if it also had an "adventure" part, you're probably thinking of Full Throttle. I played the demo, which rocked, but never got around to purchasing the full game

My brother and I finally purchased the full version of Full Throttle in the late 90's, installed it, then took it back because we thought it was just the demo because it was less than 1MB completely installed!

My earliest favorite game was on the TRS80 Model 1, I can't remember its name. It was a space battle thing, rendered in characters. Remember back in that era when you stored things on cassette tape, and it was such a hassle finding each thing you'd saved on a big, long 60-minute tape?

The first computer I owned was an Atari 800. At first I played Star Raiders a lot:What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?http://www3.sympatic...ce/star_raiders.html

Myself, I was always amazed about the quality of Turrican (C64) and R-Type (C64). I Spend a lot of time playing those. There was also one game on the C64 that allowed you to command a team of persons (each with different spec's) and fly away into space. Ships you encountered could be fought/traded with/entered etc. Planets and it's cities + houses could be entered and could result in trade, fighting, missions etc. Besides, you could also (strip) mine planets for resources.

My first game was in 1975 as a freshman in college: "Moon Lander" (numerics only) which ran on my friends HP-25 programmable calculator. In 1981-82 I spent a lot of time playing "Dungeon" (text only) on the PDP-11 at my first engineering job (it was then that I discovered that I had an addictive personality - and then swore off video games). I had a relapse in 1985 with "Star Glider" on an Atari 520ST and again in the early 90's with "Sim City" and "Wolfenstein 3D" on the PC. I then stayed "clean" for quite a while.

But in 2000, I got a new system and the video card came with several free games. One of these was "Deus Ex". It took a year before I finally got around to installing it, but once I did, I was floored. What a cool game! Spent a couple months inside that world. Currently I'm playing the recently release DX mod: "The Nameless Mod" (its almost as deep and wide as the original). Another cool (underrated) game is "SimCopter" - my favorite second only to DeusEx.

My first computer was an Apple (Actually a Franklin Ace- a clone, but I digress). My favorites were Earth Orbit Stations, Wasteland, Racing Destruction Set, Mail Order Monsters, Castle Wolfenstein (and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein), Adventure Construction Set, Archon (and Archon Adept), Autoduel, Bilestoad, Ultima Series, Windwalker, Wizardry Series, Bards Tale Series, Drol, The Might and Magic Series... I could just go on... there were some really good games back then- and a lot of them were by EA!

If I had to choose, I'd choose Earth Orbit Stations. It was so open ended, and engrossing! I'd love it if someone made a good remake.

I played a lot of games when I was a kid, but there were two that stick out in my memory that when I got home with the games and loaded them up that was it. I stayed up all night playing them till I got them beat.

Elite on the Commodore 64. Elite is one of those rare games that there were many different versions of the game with many different features. It's a game that has been done for nearly every computer platform in existence & each one of those versions has varying degrees of features. The Commodore 64 version was one of the most feature-packed or the most feature-packed as was revealed in a review I read with the original programmer of the game.

It was one of the largest, most complex games ever. Definitely for its time period and in some ways even today it is unmatched. You started out with a small modest spaceship at a random space station in a galaxy full of hundreds upon hundreds of planets. Each of these planets had its own background and economy. You could decide to haul goods from port to port for trade to make your fortune or take on missions such as escorting ships and tracking down criminals. That's if you wanted to be a good guy. If you wanted to be evil there was plenty of contraband to smuggle from drugs to slaves. Or if you preferred the gimme approach you could just load up your ship for bear and take to piracy on the space lanes blowing up ships and taking their cargo by force.

If you by chance got bored with all those planets or wore out your welcome there you could later buy a hyperdrive and travel to seven other galaxies each with just as many planets as the first one.

You started out with a ranking of Harmless and as your exploits progressed you could become Mostly Harmless, Dangerous, and a bunch of other rankings all the way up to the ultimate ranking of Elite. Once you became (in)famous enough the military comes looking for you and you get the opportunity to do top-secret military missions and get access to military hardware for your ship.

There was even an alien race for you to fight. They'd attack at random times or sometimes your hyperdrive would misfire and you'd land in a nest of them. Destroy them and you'd get alien artifacts to sell and alien gear for your ship.

And finally there was the easter egg. The mother of all enemies. There was a ship from an unknown alien race that was traveling the galaxies that you may or may not ever run into. The cool thing about this ship was it was cloaked. Invisible. Track down that ship, manage to destroy it, and the cloaking device was yours!

I managed to achieve the ranking of Elite which was not easy. You had to literally kill something like 100,000 ships or so to achieve it, but I never did grab that cloaking device.

The second game was Dungeon Master on the Amiga. People who played in on the Atari ST had a similar gaming experience, but the PC version was crap due to limitation in graphics and sound on the PC platform at the time.

There's not as much to say about this game as Elite. Not that it wasn't as good, but it was not as complicated a concept. It was an epic dungeon crawler with state-of-the-art graphics and sound for the time. Take your party of four down 25 (I think that was the number) levels and defeat the Evil Bad Guy at the bottom. Inventive monsters, traps and puzzles made it an instant classic at the time. I replayed it a few times with different party combinations and tactics to make sure I didn't miss any secret areas or items.

Like I said, I played many games, but those are the two that stick in my mind as being instant play-till-dawn obsessions.

So many of the new games just really blow- there are a few gems, but in the days of yore, graphics were not a big selling point, so they had to have the gameplay. I don't see why they can't take some of these classics and update them and re-release them!

I spend a lot of time trying to find games that are just as fun as those late nights; as a point, I just bought X2 off of Steam, and I'm hoping that's elite-ish. Privateer was one that was very similar to elite, but I agree that elite was a pretty rare gem.

But there are so many old games that could be tapped for great resurrections!

I loved Privateer as well. I just didn't play it until sleep deprivation stepped in...I actually stopped to sleep with that one.

The problem with so many of the older games and why they haven't been re-done is that either no one knows who owns the intellectual property anymore or, in the case of Privateer, the IP is own by total asshats like Electronic Arts.